Electrical utilities are required to adhere to standards set by various regulatory entities, including public service commissions, public utility commissions, and industry standards. Some of these standards address an optimal service voltage. To measure service voltage, electrical utilities commonly use meters at customer locations, as well as Advanced Metering Infrastructure (“AMI”), which allows a utility to remotely read and control meters. Electrical utilities face several challenges in meeting these regulatory standards including a huge number of meters and an even larger amount of data associated with the values measured by each meter, which can number in the hundreds of millions of data points per weeks. Due to the massive number of voltage readings, inspection of each out-of-range reading by a meter would be impractical, if not impossible. Additionally, existing practices used by electrical utilities generally require a technician to manually inspect a problematic meter, as well as the electrical grid in the near vicinity of the problematic meter. This is because several components of the electrical grid can affect the voltage readings of meters.
Electrical devices within an electrical grid are designed to operate within particular voltage ranges; operation outside of these designated voltage ranges may be detrimental to an electrical device, causing the device to operate less efficiently, age faster, or even fail. Some devices may fail for other reasons, such as a device that has outlived its useful life. Regardless, a failure of an electrical device or some other non-functionality within the electrical grid may cause localized or wide-spread power loss to customers.
Furthermore, electrical utilities commonly employ multiple types of technicians, who possess different skill levels and are outfitted with different tools. Electrical utilities frequently assign particular tasks to a given technician depending on the issue that requires attention and the type of technician. A technician sent to inspect a meter that has reported an out-of-range voltage may find that he or she does not have the correct tools or expertise for the issue causing the out-of-range readings at the meter. The electrical utility may then be required to send a second technician to correct the issue. This inefficiency can prove costly in terms of resources and money for an electrical utility. Additional expense can be incurred by an electrical utility due to false positives, which may be reported by some meters.
Moreover, existing practices of electrical utilities generally require an electrical device to fail before it can be identified and repaired or replaced. This may cause a power loss for customers.
Therefore, there is a desire for a method and system to identify and diagnose an issue in an electrical grid without manually inspecting individual meters. There is a further desire for a method and system to identify and diagnose an issue in an electrical grid prior to its occurrence, such that the issue may be repaired prior to causing a power loss to customers. Various embodiments of the present invention address these desires.